Massachusetts

I was surprised to learn there's a national park of sorts that straddles Rhode Island and Massachusetts and is home to half a million residents and 2 dozen communities. Moreover, the federal government doesn't own 1 square inch of it! I'm referring to the John H. Chafee Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor,...

We would have completely missed Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts had we not been flower lovers. While driving through the Berkshires on State Highway 2, we saw a sign that read, "A Bridge of Flowers". Intrigued, we turned off the highway and made our way to the little village. What a find! Shelburne Falls is...

Judging from outward appearances, you'd never guess there's anything unusual about the ordinary-looking Paper House located in Rockport, Massachusetts. But it's odd, all right--the two-room house and its furnishings were created with approximately 100,000 newspapers from all over the world! We discovered the unusual attraction while traveling through Massachusetts. As we learned, Elis...

The immense Quabbin Reservoir in central Massachusetts offers spectacular scenic views, especially in fall. The 39-square-mile Quabbin is the world's largest manmade reservoir devoted solely to water supply -- it provides water for the Boston area, about 65 miles east. It holds 412 billion gallons of water! At the Visitor Center outside Belchertown,...

Want to visit a real castle without taking a trip to Europe? Hammond Castle Museum in Gloucester, Massachusetts is the real thing -- a medieval-style fortress complete with towers, a drawbridge and even a dungeon. When a fellow camper told me about this place, I had to see it for myself, and I'm...

I'm always on the lookout for free or inexpensive places to visit while traveling, so I was delighted to find Longfellow's Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote about this historic place in his 1863 poem Tales of a Wayside Inn. He referred to it as "ancient" even then -- this...

...put yourself in danger. Look carefully at what you see in the viewfinder. When we get excited, we forget about everything except what excited us. Once, while I was working on whale-watching boats off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, regular customers sometimes brought photos they had taken on previous trips and told me that even though they...